


Gaps

by BurningTea



Series: Season 12 fic [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Dean and Mary talk, Gen, John's Journal, Mamma Mia - Freeform, s12e2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-23
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-24 02:12:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8352256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningTea/pseuds/BurningTea
Summary: Mary talks to Dean after reading John's journal. There are gaps that need filling in.





	

Mary wanted to fill in the gaps. She did. She wanted to talk with Sam, and with Dean, and listen to their stories about childhood games and school-age crushes and which subjects they’d loved and which sports they’d played. But Sam hadn’t given her words. Or rather, he had. He just hadn’t given her living words, from his own lips. He’d handed her dead words, trapped on paper, and let her pull him into a hug. Hugging Sam had felt wonderful, but it hadn’t felt real. 

John’s journal feels real. 

She turns the next page and fights back the warm, clogging sensation in her throat. She thinks she knows, now, some of why Dean’s face shut down at talk of his father being a great dad. If she had John in front of her right now, she’d do more than throw him out of the house. 

Dean didn’t speak. She gets that from the journal. Her beautiful, vocal, caring boy shut down and shut off his words, and John worried, he did, but it didn’t stop him from dragging Dean around the country. It didn’t stop him from making Dean responsible for his own baby brother. 

She finds herself shaking her head, wanting this to be a lie, but she can’t think of any reason Sam would have to concoct such a lie. Sam is almost a stranger to her, but John wasn’t, and much as she wishes these words were lies, she can see enough of the John she knew it them to feel the weight of reality. 

John was a marine, after all. She remembers the way he woke from nightmares, sometimes. She remembers the iron-hard determination that took him over when he felt it was necessary. That Dean and Sam might have been raised by a John locked into that mode tears at her more than it does to know they were raised Hunters at all.

She makes it as far as John recounting Sam running away before she slams the journal closed and goes in search of Dean. She has a lot of work to do building a relationship with Sam, but she needs to rebuild one with Dean. She’s spent time with him since being pulled back to life, and she had four years with him before her death. The boy she held close and sang to sleep is somewhere in this Bunker, with a childhood of obedience and duty and pain behind him. She’s his mother. He might be older than her, now, but she can’t just…she can’t just ignore that.

She finds him in the kitchen, sitting on the floor with a beer in his hand and a scatter of photographs across his knees. 

“Dean?”

He jerks, even though he must have heard her. She’s good, but she’s not exactly at her best, and she wasn’t trying to sneak up on him.

“Mom?” he says, and sits up straighter. 

She doesn’t mention anything about him rubbing at his eyes. Instead, she asks if she can join him, and sits when he nods. She nods again when he offers her a beer. It was sweet of Sam to bring her tea, but beer sounds like a much better idea right now.

She’s half a bottle down before she can bring herself to speak.

“Do you often sit in here?” she asks. 

Dean smiles, but it’s a weak and twisted thing. She’s hit by how much distance there still is between what she knows of him and what he really is, what he’s really been through. 

“Kind of a first,” he says. “Seems the time for it.”

“First time we’ve finished a hunt together,” she agrees. “I didn’t exactly take you out strapped in a pram to hunt ghosts.”

His mouth opens, just a fraction, and closes again with nothing said. Silence isn’t what she wants from him, not after reading about him losing his words altogether, and not when she so desperately wants to forge a connection to this weathered, wise and wounded man she used to cradle in her arms. 

“What were you looking at?” she asks, instead of reaching out to him and pulling him to her. She feels, somehow, she hasn’t earned that yet, the right to casual gestures of affection. “Photographs?”

“Er, yeah,” Dean says. “Yeah. Just…you know. Some things.”

“Can I…? Are they things you don’t want me to see?”

It hurts, the thought he might actively not want her to look, but that boy who came running with a shiny rock or who wanted to show her his stick-men paintings is a long time ago. Even if she’d made it to this year the normal way, Dean might have plenty of things he didn’t want to share with her by now.

Dean shrugs. He even manages to do that gracefully. Mary has no idea how she and John managed to produce someone so physically graceful. She tries not to think what kind of a man Dean could have been without the demons and without the hunting. Gentle, she thinks. Warm. Maybe he’d have helped people another way.

“I don’t have many,” he says. “Not really the kind of life where you take photographs of every damn thing, you know? And most of what I had, I kept at Bobby’s.”

“Bobby Singer,” she says, plucking the name from that journal. “You stayed with him sometimes?”

“Yeah. We did. He…he was family.” Dean shifts, flicking her a look she isn’t going to pick apart just now. “He was a second dad.” 

She got used, over years of hunting, to hearing the gaps around people’s words. In some ways, Dean doesn’t place Bobby second for that title. 

“Tell me about him,” she says. 

Dean stares at her for a while, before nodding, an infinitesimal movement of his chin, and angling one photograph her way. Bobby looks like he spends time around trucks, but there’s a kindness to his eyes that moves her. Worse people could have taken part in raising her kids.

She gets to hold one photograph, gets to trace her fingers over the cap, over the lines of this man’s face, as Dean starts to talk. The affection in his voice washes away some of her anger from earlier. John may or may not have given her boys what a father should. It’s hard to say. She knows her own dad had his faults, but he loved her, even as he dragged her around the country. Even so, it eases her to know they had Bobby, who played ball and listened to their stories and later backed them in everything. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, as Dean pauses after telling her about Bobby’s views on movie nights. 

He frowns.

“What for?” 

“For not being there,” she says. It isn’t what she meant to say, but it’s out there now. “I’m glad you had Bobby, but I’ve been reading your dad’s journal, and you shouldn’t have had to go through that.”

Dean seems to freeze, his movements stopping almost entirely. His voice is careful when he speaks.

“Dad’s journal?” he asks. “Sam give you that?”

She nods. 

“He said it might fill in some of the gaps,” she says. 

“Not exactly how I’d like you to do that,” Dean tells her, closing his eyes and tipping his head back against the counter. He sounds defeated, but like defeat is something he’s had to learn to fight through. “It makes painful reading.”

“It does,” she says. “I imagine it was worse to live it.”

He doesn’t answer that. He doesn’t have to.

“If I’d come back and you were living in huge houses with beautiful wives and children and no knowledge of hunting or of monsters at all, I’d still be sorry to have left you,” she says. “But this? Dean, I am so, so sorry you were dragged into this. I know what you’ve said. And hunting does save people and someone has to do it, but that doesn’t mean you should have been put through the childhood you had. Sweetheart, I wish I had been here.”

“I wish you had, too,” he says, soft and quiet and resigned. “But you weren’t, Mom. And we can’t change the past.” His lips quirk up. “Believe me. I tried. Angel express.”

He says that like it explains anything, but Mary files it under something to deal with later. She knows he went back in time, and she knows Castiel is an angel. Those two facts clearly fit together in some way. Castiel and how he fits into Dean’s life is another set of gaps she needs to get to. Right now it’s not important. 

“No. No, I guess you can’t. But that doesn’t mean the past doesn’t change.” When he looks at her, confusion on his face, she goes on. “The past? It’s not what you thought it was, is it? I’m not what you thought I was. I don’t cook, for one thing. The hunting? There must be more.”

“I knew you hunted,” Dean says. “Found that out when I was in the past. The cooking thing? Yeah, that threw me. I, er, I taught myself to cook. Kind of liked…”

He trails off, looks down at the beer in his hands, takes a drink.

“You felt like it brought you closer to me,” she says, and hates that Dean’s had this false connection to her taken away. Still, she can’t pretend to be something she isn’t. 

“I guess,” he says.

“I suppose there are a lot of things we’re all going to learn,” she says, and thinks about John, her warm and loving John, leaving Dean to watch over Sam for days, weeks, at a time. “Thins we’ll need to get used to. Adjust to.”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

She can’t tell if Dean is resigned, still, or something else. She supposes it doesn’t change much just now. 

“I think,” she says, and shuffles a bit closer, until she feels she could almost pull him into that hug, “that I’d prefer to fill in the gaps by talking to you. And to Sam. Reading it… It’s hard.”

“Yeah. I get that,” he says. “It just…might take a while. Lot to get through. Some of it’s all kinds of messed up.”

“Fair enough,” she says, and sets herself to be patient. Filling in all the spaces of 33 years of absence won’t happen overnight. “How about we fill in one gap at a time.”

Dean nods, and this time his smile is warmer, more real. 

“Okay,” he says. 

“And maybe we do it sitting somewhere more comfortable?” she asks. “Do you even have a sofa here?”

Dean laughs at that, and tells her they don’t, and agrees they can go find one real soon. For now, they move to the library and switch to hot chocolate, and Dean tells her about the time Sammy tried to make hot chocolate for Bobby, back when they were still kids, and Mary feels a space inside her fill in. It’s just one gap, but it’s something where before she had nothing. For now, it’ll do.


End file.
